Last week, when a massive fire broke out at the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral, a pall spread over the world. Journalists reported the event in hushed voices, as if mourning the death of a loved one. Onlookers were shown singing hymns and offering prayers on the street as the blaze spread.
Sales of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame , written in the 1800s, started soaring. Suddenly, the basic premise of Hugo’s book, which was to draw attention to the neglect faced by this gem of Gothic architecture (beyond the tragic romance between its deformed protagonist Quasimodo and the gypsy Esmeralda), became more relevant than ever.
So enthralled was Hugo by the cathedral’s crumbling beauty, that he devoted two entire chapters to just describing it. His powerful text is said to have spurred its last major restoration in 1844.
While over-tourism has sapped the charm of the world’s best-known buildings, writers have always used them to keep readers engaged in their hyper-real world.
Curious about what other famous sites play a leading role in books? Here are five, so you can simultaneously catch up on your travel and your reading.
Pillars of the Great Hypostyle Hall from the Precinct of Amun-Re
Ancient whodunit
Agatha Christie’s passion for natural history in Egypt and West Asia formed the backdrop of many of her best-selling novels like Death on the Nile , Come, Tell Me How You Live , and Murder in Mesopotamia ... and served as an informal guide to aspiring travellers to the region.
Ancient Egypt is the star in Death Comes as the End (published in 1944), that is Christie’s only novel that isn’t set in the 20th Century, and has no European characters. The whodunit is about a rapid succession of mysterious killings in the family of Imhotep, a mortuary priest, in 2000 BC-era Thebes (in modern-day Luxor).
Fugitive from history
Dan Brown’s omniscient Harvard professor and cryptologist Robert Langdon takes readers on a historical wild goose chase through Italy’s Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Vecchio and the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, while battling amnesia, in the 2013 novel Inferno . The sweeping canvas of the thriller that re-imagines the first chapter of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy , remains a page-turner due to its hectic pace and the antics of its ‘transhumanist’ supervillain, Bertrand Zobrist.
Hagia Sophia in istanbul, Turkey.
Lunch at Leos
Leopold Café and Bar, a Parsi restaurant established in 1871 in Mumbai’s Colaba Causeway, is a quiet background character in the 2003 semi-autobiographical book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. The target of terror attacks in 2008, the café has become a much-visited tourist spot due to Shantaram’s descriptive passages about its typical ‘Mumbaiyya’ culture.
A bridge across fiction
California’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge is an integral part of popular culture, and turns up regularly in films and documentaries. Scottish writer Alistair MacLean set his 1976 kidnap drama The Golden Gate on the bridge, making the US President and two of his West Asian guests hostages of a criminal group masterminded by Peter Branson. Quite at the other end of the spectrum was Vikram Seth’s début verse novel, also titled The Golden Gate . The exploration on the life of young professionals in San Francisco — written in 590 stanzas — won Seth the 1988 Sahitya Akademi Award for English.
- Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1873) continues to inspire people to recreate the journey of its fictional hero Phileas Fogg and his French valet Passepartout.
- In 1889, American journalist Nellie Bly travelled around the world in 72 days for her newspaper New York World , and even met Verne in Amiens, France. Her book, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days became a bestseller.
- Comedian, writer and television presenter Michael Palin’s modern take on Verne’s work in the form of a book and seven-part BBC documentary in 1989, is a classic in its own right.
- Another fictional hero who does very well in the real world is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes. Most literature-loving visitors to London will usually plan a stopover at 221b, Baker Street where “the world famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes lived between 1881-1904, according to the stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” says the official website of the museum dedicated to the sleuth.
Store as star
Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories makes the city of New York its focus, as seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator who befriends a society girl called Holly Golightly. Its film version, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in the lead, transposed the ‘party mood’ of the novella’s 1940s to the 1960s with great success, besides highlighting major fashion trends like the sheath gown and string of pearls worn by Hepburn. New York’s Tiffany & Co (founded in 1837) is actually a jewellery store, and not a restaurant. But in deference to the popularity of the film and novella (where Holly nibbles on a croissant while window shopping there), it finally opened The Blue Box Café at its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 2017. Fans can finally have breakfast at Tiffany’s.
